updated 03:15 pm EDT, Fri July 11, 2008

FCC Not to Fine Comcast

The Federal Communications Commission's recommendation to punish Comcast for its throttling of traffic won't involve fines, the Commission's chairman Kevin Martin quickly added on Friday. After initially sending out a blanket warning that the FCC would take action against the cable provider for arbitarily filtering BitTorrent and other traffic, Martin now says he would rather demand just that Comcast be forced to identify its throttling and disable it in place of paying a large sum to the government.

Comcast is again fighting the claims and has denied both certain types of throttling it's believed to practice as well as any assertions that net neutrality is codified in law, asserting that it has the right to manage traffic in a reasonable way.

"You can't enforce this because there aren't any rules," says spokeswoman Sena Fitzmaurice. "It violates all sorts of due processes in the way you are supposed to create rules."

Martin has responded by arguing that the absence of a fine removes punishment while achieving the intended effect. The remaining four FCC commissioners will have an opportunity to vote on the recommendation on August 1st.